As a regular Steam user and fan of Valve games I find the game announcement disappointing and frustrating. I don’t have a problem with the game itself but I am slowly feeling more and more disillusioned with how Valve has been handling their core games. The TF2 community has been slowly dying due to their neglect, the game hasn’t seen regular updates for a whole year or longer. L4D2 and Portal 2 hasn’t seen any attention at all in years. Right now only CS:GO and DOTA2 are getting attention, both are games I have no interest in. I’ve since given up on TF2 and I’m now regularly playing Overwatch by Blizzard.

The TF2 community has been slowly dying due to their neglect, the game hasn’t seen regular updates for a whole year or longer. L4D2 and Portal 2 hasn’t seen any attention at all in years.

I’m always completely perplexed by these statements.

Team Fortress 2 was released a decade ago in October. The company is under no obligation to keep working on it after it’s released, let alone for 10 years. Maybe they’ve decided to stop working on it. Why should they continue to work on it?

As for L4D2 and Portal, what more support do you want? Left 4 Dead 2 is out, it’s finished, and you can still play it. Same with Portal 2.

Games aren’t a service to be worked on in perpetuity by a developer to placate their fans. Sometimes games are just finished.

I would just like to add my standard comment that the blockbuster-oriented business model of triple-A games dooms them to a spiral of douchey, conservative sucking. If someone spends 3 years making something that costs $300million, and then recoups their costs in an orgy of $50 disc sales, is it very surprising that they don’t continue to blow your socks off at the same level for the next decade?

Considering how Valve is set up as a company, it is impossible to get anyone to do work they don’t want to do. Everyone will simply gravitate to the fun projects rather than slog through maintaining communities. Just like if an author does not feel inspired to write a sequel, he won’t write it. Valve has the advantage of not having to fulfil contractual obligations for sequels, so they won’t.

So they wanted to make a card game? Heck, why not? It seems all they really needed to do was manage expectations better.

Team Fortress 2 was released a decade ago in October. The company is under no obligation to keep working on it after it’s released, let alone for 10 years. Maybe they’ve decided to stop working on it. Why should they continue to work on it?

Their previous Counter Strike was released in 2000 and still receives regular updates from Valve. I guess you don’t play Valve games, they built their reputation for supporting their games indefinitely. TF2 is still technically in active development as there are two separate updates planned: A Jungle themed update and a significant rebalancing of the game dubbed the Pyro update. However knowing full well that these updates are in progress i feel deeply frustrated with the company because they’ve stopped all communication with the community, stopped releasing updates beyond patches, and over the past few years they’ve introduced changes to matchmatching that effectively killed community run servers, and have been wholly unable to stop rampant hacking/cheating in their official servers.

Clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about. So yes, you must be perplexed by my statements because you don’t know what the core community has been going through. I am an admin to what used to be a large community and website for the game, i’ve invested significant time and money into TF2, L4D and L4D2, Portal 2, etc. and i’ve had to accept over the past few years that Valve has fully stopped caring about their communities and is only focused on VR, making money on Steam, and DOTA2.

They regularly hide files with HL3 as part of the naming convention in various games to fuck with people mining for game data. Occasionally it does seem to turn up some interesting insights but usually it’s just a bunch of noise.

I don’t have a problem with the game itself but I am slowly feeling more and more disillusioned with how Valve has been handling their core games

bobtato:

I would just like to add my standard comment that the blockbuster-oriented business model of triple-A games dooms them to a spiral of douchey, conservative sucking.

Oddly the answer to both these very different view points is: That is not the way Valve develops games.

For better or worse Valve mostly allows it’s development side to pick what projects they work on. That means that if enough developers inside Valve want to make card game instead of maintain their existing games that is what happens.

This is one reason Valve games haven’t been sucked into the AAA cycle of diminishing returns on yearly releases of game franchises that removed the much loved feature from last years release to make budget and deadlines and so that they can add it back as DLC in 6 months.

None of this really excuses Valve’s fickle behavior, but it does me that, I at least, don’t attribute to Valve the same money first motives I would ascribe to a company like EA.

It’s definitely good that internally Valve employees get to pitch and/or work on projects they feel passionate about. It has led some truly great content in the past, but over the past few years there’s been nothing to show for it beyond VR and DOTA2 updates. There have been no new games, little to no support for existing games, and surprisingly an increased detachment to the communities that built up their reputation and platform. How do you work at a game company but produce no games?

Again, that’s their prerogative, and there’s no shortage of great games from other companies but i’m just voicing my frustration and the frustration i see daily from other community members.

I guess you don’t play Valve games, they built their reputation for supporting their games indefinitely.

If by “don’t play Valve games” you mean “have played every major release in the N.A. market, yes even Ricochet and Alien Swarm” then yeah, I guess I don’t play Valve games. How’s the Day of Defeat: Source community doing? How are they looking for updates?

I also play other games, and am not going to invest my time and money into a product in a way that, when it reaches an inevitable EOL, I will be frustrated about that. Because everything reaches EOL at some point. It’ll happen to Overwatch as well.

I do have friends that occasionally play Day of Defeat, though that was never my thing. Also said game was never a major corner stone of Valve community-wise, TF2 and L4D were fairly active up until the last 2-3 years or so. More so TF2, Valve is happy to take your money for micro-transactions still but offers no real value in return.
To the point, you don’t understand why people would complain about a lack of updates on old games? I am giving you those reasons, as someone who has invested significantly in the games, the community, private servers spread out across various Valve games, etc.
Should they decide those games no longer need regular updates then i can live with that as long as their intention is made clear on that point, their current official status is that development and support on those is still ongoing. which is not reflective of the reality of how they’ve been handling things.

Again, that’s their prerogative, and there’s no shortage of great games from other companies but i’m just voicing my frustration and the frustration i see daily from other community members.

And I don’t intend to minimize that at all. I’ve expressed the same feelings in the past. I had quotes in two different years for TF2 in Wired’s yearly vapor ware awards back before TF2 was released. I bought Half-Life at launch because TF2 was going to be released as a free mod a few months after that. It turns out that was a good purchase, but at the time I was pissed we got, after much delay, TFC a bare rehash of the QWTF I was still playing at the time instead of a real successor.

It really seems that the downside of Valve’s structure is that they have a lot of false starts, stop and restarts, and some times just half baked left to die projects. Without central planning I’d assume some of these projects dwindle down to one dedicated person pushing them forward and no management to just call it dead and announce a cancellation in a press release.